For all those that bring into question my comment:

Submitted by Patrik Ian Taylor (United States), Feb 4, 2003 at 23:13

Check out Christianity on Trial: Arguments against anti-religious bigotry. It points out many of the faults in many of your statements (there's an entire chapter on Christianity and American democracy and it brings up the good AND the bad):

For instance: The claim that our country was founded by "freethinkers" and "diests not fundamentalists in any meaningful sense of the word." Well I wonder how one would define these words of George Washington:
"...do Justice ...love mercy and ...demean ourselves with that Charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation."

Or how about John Adams (president #2) who said:
"Our Constitution was written for a moral and religious people and it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

OR

"[the US had been founded] on the general principles of Christianity."

Here's a passage from the book which is also interesting:
For all their largely mythical sternness, Puritians simply did not have the stomach for repression on a grand scale. It was never their goal to impose beliefs on others; instead, they ejected dissenters from their communities. Even this policy began to break down when a few truly stiff-necked Quakers, who wouldn't depart and actually invaded Congregational churches in a bid for martyrdom, forced a showdown in the 1650s and 1660s. Puritian public opinion recoiled from the brutal punishments inflicted on Quakers, generating what Patricia Bonomi calls, "a turning point in New England's attitude toward religious toleration." It was the first evidence that religious competition in the United States wouldn't result primarily in strife, as it too often had in the Old World.

Yeah, darn those old religious thinkers, good thing there were diests around to... ummm... what did they do again?

The fact is, America has a very strong religious heritage and it is this heritage that has made the country what it is today. It was the leading force behind ending slavery and granting equal rights to women among countless other things we all take for granted, whether all of you "anti-religious bigots" like it or not.

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